Tarzanesque
Tarzanesque (in French: Tarzanide) is a term created by Frenchman Francis Lacassin[1] used to describe characters in comic books inspired by Tarzan.
[2] A tarzanesque character resembles Tarzan in his physical resourcefulness, within a line of action that includes an adventurous life in the jungle, the gift of understanding and being understood by animals, contact with lost civilizations and courage combined with the ability to deal with nature.
The creation of such characters may have been propitiated by the success that Tarzan had achieved since his appearance in literature in 1912,[3] culminating with the release of daily comic strips in 1929, which paved the way for a genre that combined the allure of the unknown environment, the need for the archetypal characteristics of the hero and the popularity of access.
[19] In 1934, Alex Raymond created the comic strips Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim to compete, respectively, with Buck Rogers and Tarzan.
[31] Sheena was the first "jungle girl" to wear a leopard-skin bikini, which would soon become a cliché,[32][33] and was also the first heroine to get her own comic book, published by Fiction House between 1942 and 1953.
It was adapted from Bob Byrd's short story "King of Fang and Claw", initially published in the hero's pulp magazine.
Besides the Belgian Congo, Ka-Zar would live adventures in Somaliland (a region of Somalia), Ethiopia, Kenya, England and the United States and face the most varied villains: hunters, smugglers, fascists, Nazis, among others.
[16][37] In 1941, Republic Pictures released the film serial Jungle Girl, about young Nyoka Meredith (Frances Gifford), raised in Africa by her father.
[48] This was not the first attempt at a black Tarzanesque; the also African-American Matt Baker[34] created Voodah[49] in 1945, for the third issue of Golfing/McCombs Publisher's Crown Comics[obsolete source].
[62] Thun'da (whose real name is Robert Drum) is an American Air Force aviator who gets lost in the Congo and who, in the comics, faced dinosaurs and prehistoric beings,[nt 2] but due to budget cuts, these elements were not present in the series.
[64] In 1953, Joe Kubert released Tor,[65] which differed from Tarzan by setting its stories in prehistoric times (more precisely in the year 1 million BC, corresponding to the Quaternary Period, which is considered by paleontologists to be the time when the first humans appeared;[66] despite this, the author used poetic license and included dinosaurs in Tor's stories).
[81] Targo was an orphan who survived a plane crash in the Amazon rainforest (more precisely in the border of the state of Amazonas with Peru, although he also had stories set in the Brazilian Plateau[82]) and was raised by indigenous peoples.
The character had stories produced by artists such as Helena Fonseca, Jayme Cortez, Gedeone Malagola, Nico Rosso, Rodolfo Zalla, Moacir Rodrigues Soares,[32][82] and like Tarzan and Thun'da, Targo also lived with prehistoric creatures considered extinct.
The idea of an Amazon inhabited by prehistoric beings had already been portrayed in the book The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1912.
[82] Under Jayme Cortez's guidance, the character was a joint creation of editors and cartoonists from Editora Outubro , and it was up to Gedeone Malagola to name the hero.
[85] Gedeone himself had also created another Tarzan-inspired character, "Tambu"[86] and made Tor stories by Joe Kubert for Gráfica Novo Mundo.
[93] Another French creation was Yataca, born in the Amazon Jungle, living his adventures in the Americas for twenty issues, and after that, inexplicably, his stories moved to Africa.
[4] Between 1967 and 1968, DC Comics published Bomba, the Jungle Boy[94] whose main character had appeared in a series of books beginning in 1926 and ending in 1938.
[35] The new Ka-Zar appears as a secondary character in the Uncanny X-Men comic book , where the Belgian Congo was swapped for the fictional Savage Land (a tropical zone curiously located in the Antarctic Circle,[4] also inhabited by apparently extinct prehistoric beings, very similar to Pellucidar, the hollow earth created by Burroughs),[24][99] the lion Zar for the saber-toothed cat Zabu, and David Rand for Kevin Plunder.
[13] In 2000, TV Globo launched the telenovela Uga-Uga by Carlos Lombardi, where the actor Claudio Heinrich played a young man raised by indigenous peoples[102] who looked like Tarzan.
[113] In 1999, comic book writer Warren Ellis and cartoonist John Cassaday created several pulp-inspired characters for the Planetary series.
[121] In 2007, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle had a five-issue miniseries published by Devil's Due Digital, scripted by Steven E. de Souza (a screenwriter best known for the screenplay of the Bruce Willis film Die Hard), drawings by Matt Merhoff, and covers designed by Joe Jusko, Nicola Scott, Khary Randolph, and Tim Seeley.
[124][125] In 2011, Dynamite Entertainment launched Lord of the Jungle comic book , and although it is in the public domain, the name Tarzan cannot be used in the titles without permission.
